Designing for Tension
Why resilient teams, systems, and societies are built to hold difference, not erase it.
It feels like we’re living in a time of constant tension. There’s the tension between wanting to live an ordinary, peaceful life and the awareness of the extraordinary crises happening around us. Between the daily tasks of emails, errands, and paying bills, and the existential questions of how to exist meaningfully on a planet in polycrisis. Between wanting to care deeply and the need to stay sane.
And there’s another layer of tension that runs through our societies. Across politics, culture, and communities, polarization feels sharper than ever. The divide grows wider as our collective fear grows deeper. Because polarization is born from fear. Fear of difference. Fear of what we don’t understand. Fear of the “other.” And when fear takes hold, our nervous systems go into protection mode. We stop listening, we stop learning, and we harden against what could otherwise expand us.
The more tension builds, the more we try to escape it. Yet tension is not the problem itself. It’s the signal that something wants to evolve.
From Polarization to Polarity
There’s a difference between polarization and polarity. Polarization pushes apart; polarity connects opposites. Polarity is the tension that gives rise to life, the pull between expansion and contraction, stillness and movement, day and night, yin and yang. It is the dynamic balance that holds the world together.
In my own life, I’ve felt this through my relationship with my husband. Our polarity allows us to meet life as complements, not competitors. When I lean into my yin, my intuition, reflection, and receptivity, I create space for his yang to hold structure and action. Sometimes we fall out of balance. My intensity from work can spill into our home, or he might become overly focused on fixing instead of feeling. But the return to balance always clarifies who we are and what we each bring. The tension, though uncomfortable, is what keeps our relationship alive.
This is the essence of healthy polarity. It’s not about eliminating difference but learning how to hold it with awareness. Polarization fractures, but polarity harmonizes.
Designing for Tension at Work
Recently, I was working with a sustainability team at a fast-growing athletics brand. They were bright, values-driven, and deeply committed to their mission, yet tension had built up in the team. Competing communication styles and emotional undercurrents had created fatigue instead of creativity.
So, in our workshop, we created space for honesty and reflection. What emerged was not a team that needed fixing, but a team that needed design. When differences are ignored, tension becomes friction. When differences are designed for, tension becomes strength.
Most workplaces were built for a single archetype: linear, rational, and emotionally restrained. They weren’t designed for authenticity, emotion, or true diversity of thought. As we’ve invited people to bring their “whole selves” to work, we’ve forgotten that the systems themselves weren’t made to hold that fullness.
We need new ways of working that design for diversity, and therefore design for tension.
Interestingly, the word intentional holds tension within it. Its Latin root, intentio, means “a stretching or straining toward.” To be intentional is to stretch our awareness toward something, to hold the pull between where we are and where we want to go. In this way, being intentional at work or in life is not about control or perfection; it’s about learning to stay with the stretch.
When we consciously design tension into our systems between different viewpoints, energies, and experiences, we build resilience. Tension, when designed well, strengthens the whole.
Knowing Your Own Energy
Of course, we can’t design for tension if we don’t understand our own.
In my earlier essay on embodiment as the foundation of entrepreneurship, I wrote that embodiment is how we remember who we truly are beneath our conditioning. When we aren’t embodied, we lead from habit, from fear, from imitation, from trying to meet others’ expectations. We’re reacting to life, not creating with it.
It’s only through embodiment that we begin to “know thyself.” That ancient instruction isn’t about intellect; it’s about awareness. To know yourself is to be in relationship with your energy, to see where you naturally expand and where you contract. It’s to recognize your triggers, your rhythms, and your ways of restoring balance.
Once you know your own energetic patterns, tension no longer feels threatening. You can distinguish between external tension, the healthy friction of diversity, and internal tension, the discomfort of confronting your own conditioning. This awareness transforms relationships, at home, in leadership, and in teams. Because you’re no longer projecting your inner conflicts onto others; you’re present enough to engage with theirs.
From Dangerous Tension to Creative Tension
The difference between dangerous and creative tension often comes down to fear. When people are scared of tension, they try to eliminate it altogether. I spoke recently with a colleague who studies fascism, and he described this as its defining characteristic: a refusal to tolerate tension. “My way or the highway.” One truth, one path, one story. It’s an attempt to control what cannot be controlled, a narrowness that mistakes rigidity for safety.
But tension itself is not dangerous. It becomes dangerous when we deny it, suppress it, or attempt to dominate it. When we stop feeling it.
In systems thinking, creative tension is what drives transformation. It’s the space between reality and possibility, between what is and what could be. The greater the distance, the greater the creative potential, if we can hold it without collapsing into despair or denial.
Our challenge, as individuals and as societies, is to learn how to stay with the stretch. To neither retreat into comfort nor explode into reaction. To meet tension with curiosity, not fear.
This is how ecosystems work. The mycorrhizal networks beneath forests thrive through tension, the exchange and give-and-take between species. The balance of nutrients, water, and sunlight is never static; it is always recalibrating. Life itself depends on tension.
We, too, are ecosystems. And when we remember that, we begin to see difference not as a threat, but as a source of vitality.
Learning to Stay With the Stretch
Tension teaches us about ourselves: what we resist, what we fear, what we value. It asks us to become more aware, more compassionate, and more capable of holding the paradoxes of our time.
We don’t need to eliminate tension; we need to work with it. To know ourselves deeply enough that we can engage with others without losing our center. To build workplaces, relationships, and societies that are flexible enough to hold difference without breaking.
If we can learn to stay with the stretch, to meet tension as teacher rather than enemy, we might just find the balance that the world so desperately needs.
Because harmony doesn’t come from sameness. It comes from holding opposites with care until they begin to sing.